deathmtn

We have COVID vaccination appointments for the guy. This shit is real!

Mixed local election news. First, the most important thing, the three ballot questions about putting some checks on the Cambridge city manager passed. Like I’ve said before, he’s like an unelected mayor right now that sometimes chooses not to answer questions from the council at all.

the council is disappointing and more small-c conservative than I was hoping for. There’s three established NIMBYs, and four who go along with whatever real estate developers go for. One of the new guys, Paul Toner, is sort of a Tim Toomey 2, a “pro-business” (e.g. use procedural tricks to keep indoor public gatherings going at the peak of the pandemic) old White Cambridge representative.

Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, who I put down as #1, as the rare council member who was pro-affordable housing development and actually asked for police and city manager accountability, is out.

A bright spot is that my #2 vote, Burhan Azeem, is a newly elected councilor. He explicitly does not take developer money and has worked for Abundant Housing MA, so hopefully he’s neither a NIMBY or someone that doesn’t try hard enough to get social housing. He’s also explicitly in favor of shifting some police duties to an unarmed alternative response team.

On the school committee, the guy that exists to keep getting re-elected, Fred Fantini won again. But he had fewer cites than Ayesha Wilson, who got more social workers to the district. And Akriti Bhambi, who seems like a Pete Buttigieg, of course, got elected with her huge budget.

Over in Boston, Wu got elected, so that’s good news.

- Voted. The election commissioner was late to unlock the dropbox. Someone crammed their ballot in the locked slot so that it was sticking out. The election commissioner came by and grabbed it and unlocked the slot just as I got there.
- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off.
- Applied to a couple of part-time jobs. (No further word from the client that said my contract looked fine, and they'd run it by their bosses for approval.)
- Got groceries.
- Realized that when I get FFT snapshots from the Pure Data side, I'm taking them at arbitrary times, so they are snapshots of arbitrary blocks. Snapshots of different blocks in this signal are often similar to each other, but they're not the same. On the Juce side, I'm logging every single block, so I'm surprised the log is actually readable. (It's net bad that it is because it's deceptive.)
- Implemented a block counter on the Pure Data side. This is set up for being able to take snapshots of specific blocks so that the comparison to the snapshots of the same specific blocks on the Juce side can be more valid.
- Fixed the remaining encapsulation leaks in my Pure Data homework patch. Making a ticker without send/receive/value was surprisingly tricky.
- Objects removed from house today: old warped doormat, prescription keratoconazole shampoo that expired last year.
- Read some Piketty.
- Interviewed with one of the part-time jobs I applied to. It was only fifteen minutes. It went well and also they might not need to check contractors out that hard because they can just fire them at any time. It seems legit? Someone else from Recurse is currently working with them and getting paid.
- Went to the contractors' roundtable. Heard quite a bit of interesting real talk, and one of the participants got everyone to speak in actual numbers about their rates, which helped everyone. Also learned a lot about negotiating with clients and (in some points of view) their two main drivers: fear of the job getting screwed up and their desire to feel like they got a good deal.
- Made dinner.
- Filled out an NDA and confidentiality agreement, the hardest part of which was going through Observatory to pick out any of my "inventions" that might possibly fall into that company's domain. Also consented to a criminal background check, but at least did not consent to waiving rights to a class action suit against the criminal background check company. I stood a tiny bit of ground there.

3x5 deadlifts. Kinda ran out of time of working out today.

A ye olde labor chant:

Take, for example, Abbé Sieyés a member of the clergy who was nevertheless elected as a representative of the third estate in the Estates General and who became well known for the pamphlet he published in January 1789, which began with these famous words: “What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been in the political order to date? Nothing. What does it want? To become something.” After an introductory blast denouncing the wrongs of the French nobility, which he compared “to the castes of the Greater Indies and ancient Egypt” (although Sieyes does not elaborate on the comparison, he clearly did not intend it as a compliment), he set forth his principal demand:
that the three orders which King Louis XVI had just convoked to a meeting in Versailles in April 1789 be allowed to sit together, with as many votes for the third estate as for the two other orders combined ( in other words, the third estate would get 50 percent of the votes.)

From Piketty. It goes on to note that the third estate was 98% of the population.

Car travel needs to be cut way down, but I will miss listening to death metal in the car. I was listening to Worm on the way to the grocery store this morning. That kind of thudding sound really comes across well in a smallish confined space.

- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off, picked up.
- Interviewed for a contractor gig. Had a good talk actually, but at the end, I learned they were looking for someone who would eventually go full-time as a principal software engineer, and the best I could say was a version of "I'd be willing to do that if I can't do what I really want to do." Really nice to talk to a reasonably human interviewer, though.
- Built the ability to ignore values above a certain magnitude into my graphing tool. I helped with a signal that had a lot of 10000000s in it in addition to a lot of other values that were nowhere close to that. I think the next thing to look at is the way some FFT results seem like they might be sort of reversed on the frequency axis in the Juce version of the tool.
- Had a chat with a colleague that got into some talk about Piketty, then I found that I had veered into criticism of big tech companies and corporations' ability to launder atrocities, which probably sounds like ranting when you say too much at one time. Gotta watch out for that!
- Read some more Piketty.
- Did some more of homework 3 from the Puckette course. I think that's probably enough of that one.
- Went to the Puckette study group. Only one other regular showed up; no one else is doing the homework right now. I hope the group doesn't die off because it's gonna be harder to make myself do this stuff, but it's a possibility.
- Figured out how to rank my choices for the Cambridge ranked choice voting election. I mostly knew what I was going to do for city council and the ballot questions (yes to all; they're all about city manager accountability), but I had to look up all of the school committee candidates and still wasn't sure even after that.

I forgot to time my run, but it was the one that goes from school, up a hill in Somerville, then back home. 12 pull-ups.

- Kicked off scheduling for next D&D.
- Tried to use the gift card I got from a milk price-fixing class action suit I was included in, but a lot of payment services want a zip code with your credit card number, which I didn't have. I'm determined to use this $7, but I gotta admit my determination is fading.
- "Helped" the guy make a stop-motion video.
- Read a bunch of Blindsight.
- Recorded a podcast with Rehydrate.
- Made dinner.
- Went trick-or-treating.
- Decided not to bail on Centipedes of Many Sizes and finished it up.

- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off, picked up.
- Emailed client with contract updated with the change they wanted.
- Looked up more stuff about foreign exchange fees. My bank will actually not change fees, but does it through Wise, which will charge a fee that is a tenth of PayPal's fee and probably get a good rate.
- Helped someone with their D3 issue, which turned out to be mostly a Promise issue. Also learned about some complex affiliate bonus fraud that local merchants in India coordinate, even though they're not that computer-literate. This kind of thing requires a lot of trust. One merchant has to buy stuff from a merchant in another city, who then buys stuff from a merchant in yet another city, then that merchant buys stuff from the first merchant. I forget what they get out of this. I think it may be reputation in the online service?
- Watched the Recurse end-of-batch presentations.
- Made dinner, made sure homework got started.
- Started making a scraper to test out a concept. Some sites really care about which device you report that you are these days.
- Fixed a git config thing that had been bothering me for a year.
- Added two riffs to the "centipede" dungeon synth piece. They might go with it, or that might not. I can't judge until tomorrow.

33-minute run, 12 pull-ups.